“In the Signature Theater Company’swarm embrace of a revival of Mr. Kushner’s two-part masterwork, that same angel (Robin Weigert, in a part originated by Ellen McLaughlin) shows up with a smile. It is a triumphant “I rule” sort of smile. But the closer you look (and this production encourages close inspection), the less confident she seems. This angel has feet of clay. Or do I mean flesh and bone? She is — like God, in the Joan Osborne song — one of us.

In like manner Michael Greif’s production feels cozier, more accessible and less startling than you may remember. That’s not just because the Peter Norton Space — where “Millennium Approaches,” the first half of “Angels,” opened on Thursday night — is so much smaller than the Walter Kerr Theater on Broadway, where it originally played.

The truth is we’ve gotten used to “Angels in America” in the intervening years; we’ve grown accustomed to the theatrical audacity and intellectual reach of this study in the intersection of personal, political and cosmic crises in the early days of the AIDS epidemic. The play has never left our cultural consciousness.”